Data warehouses may contain large volumes of data. To
answer queries efficiently, therefore, requires highly efficient
access methods and query processing techniques. Several
issues arise. First, data warehouses use redundant structures
such as indices and materialized views. Choosing which
indices to build and which views to materialize is an
important physical design problem. The next challenge is to
effectively use the existing indices and materialized views to
answer queries. Optimization of complex queries is another
important problem. Also, while for data-selective queries,
efficient index scans may be very effective, data-intensive
queries need the use of sequential scans. Thus, improving the
efficiency of scans is important. Finally, parallelism needs to
be exploited to reduce query response times. In this short
paper, it is not possible to elaborate on each of these issues.
Therefore, we will only briefly touch upon the highlights.